


Elusive Understandings

by shlynn



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Contemplation, M/M, Other, Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 19:25:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shlynn/pseuds/shlynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Mystery", really, is a word whose use ought to be reserved as solely a literary genre. Mysteries don't exist in real life, and Sherlock Holmes knows this. They're just elusive understandings. Temporarily elusive understandings. Eventually, unfailingly, he solves them. Always.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elusive Understandings

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted from my LiveJournal because I like this one. Not sure what this qualifies as, to tell the truth.

"Mystery", really, is a word whose use ought to be reserved as solely a literary genre. Mysteries don't exist in real life, and Sherlock Holmes knows this. They're just elusive understandings. Temporarily elusive understandings. Eventually, unfailingly, he solves them. Always.

If he had to admit that mystery really did exist in the world, he would still find the common definition rather unfitting. Mysteries were, if anything other than a selection of books or films, people above all else. And there were three he could immediately identify.

He consistently warred with himself when he tried to decide on the placement of his second- and third-ranking "mystery" people - Moriarty and himself. His pride put Moriarty at third and himself at second. His frustration sometimes reversed it.

Unfalteringly, though, first place was spoken for.

And it is the decidedly solid placement of Doctor John Watson as number one on Sherlock's list of real mysteries that makes Sherlock truly reluctant to admit that they exist at all; that they aren't just another set of temporarily elusive understandings for which he will eventually find answers.

He knows what it is that has him on such uncertain grounds with it all.

It's hope.

\---

Moriarty infuriates him. Still. Even after his death. Sherlock argues stubbornly with himself that if Moriarty were still alive, he wouldn't even make the list at all. He might still be solvable. But the trail went cold and bloody and dead on the rooftop of a hospital and that's all there is to that.

Truth be told, if it weren't for his ego and his all-important track record, Sherlock doesn't think he'd care that much if Moriarty remained an unresolved heap of questions and chaos forever. It's not like mess, of all things, ever bothered the consulting detective anyway.

He is decidedly less keen on exploring the reasons for why he feels compelled to consider himself a "mystery", along these lines. Mostly because it brings about memories of Mycroft's smarmy face trying to goad him into moments of self-realization. To be quite short about it, fuck that.

John. John is a whole other creature.

John seems, upon initial analysis, to be the type of person who is easily figured out. There are times when Sherlock truly believes he's done it, until he realizes that it's clumsily placed sentiment, of all things, fueling this conclusion, rather than logic. And that's the only part about it that irritates him; the constantly recurring misdiagnosis.

Because other than that, Sherlock is truly not as bothered as he knows he should be that he doesn't understand John. That John is absolutely baffling in that he can be the definition of a simpleton when it comes to the everyday, and yet in the long run, his artlessness somehow compounds to create the inexplicable being that is Sherlock's flatmate.

It's only when Sherlock backpedals into the mystery of himself that the problem of John starts to really eat away at him. It's only when he starts questioning how on earth he could live with this taunt every day and not only bear the lack of resolve, but enjoy it - and he's back at the potential answers he refuses to revisit too regularly.

John is unnerving.

But then John is there.

And Sherlock is utterly calm.

\---

If mystery exists outside the world of terribly scripted dialogue and disappointingly predictable board games, Sherlock has yet to see it in anything that isn't a consulting criminal, a consulting detective, or the most extra ordinary (in two words and in one) man he's ever known.

Sometimes, on days when his three-patch-problem rears its ugly head in full force and he finds himself tied to the tracks of endless trains of thought, he believes he can maybe feel himself getting closer. Closer to figuring it out; closer to reducing these unsolvables to the usual level of fleeting interest that any regular curiosity held.

Of course, he only ever gets closer. He never actually does away with it.

And someone as terribly clever as Sherlock, while perhaps unable to solve certain "mysteries", as they were, inevitably knows at least why he can't solve them.

He's afraid.

It isn't the sweating, shaking, easy-to-startle afraid that he'd felt at Baskerville. It's a steady, creeping sort of dread that filled him as he came first to the conclusion that all three mysteries were related, and secondly to the abrupt realization of exactly how intertwined they were.

By comparison, it made him feel as though perhaps being driven by Mycroft to some mad (and incredibly false) admission of obsession with dwarf porn might be a treat.

The bare bones of the matter is this:

Is it not only plausible, but likely that Sherlock could become what Moriarty was?

What, then, might Sherlock become with John?

And is the first question dependent on the second - a question that inevitably leads to the same place every time, making Sherlock shudder and close his eyes and breathe through his nose and thumb his wrist for his pulse -

What might Sherlock become without him?

\---

There is a night when Sherlock comes as close as he believes he will ever come to solving it, and he is pacing restlessly, manically, helplessly in his room when he reaches it, door locked and John rapping politely on the other side out of concern.

He doesn't have the answers, no.

But he realizes he won't ever have the answers, not really, until he stops tampering with the data by wishing for certain outcomes.

After a half hour of consistent pacing and thinking and concurrent knocking and calls of "Sherlock?" from the other side of the door, everything abruptly stops. Sherlock sits down on the bed. He hears John's footsteps fading away into the flat. He lowers his face into his hands. He can feel John's resigned sigh cross the flat like a softly persistent breeze.

He lets out a sigh of his own.

\---

It's difficult to say whether Sherlock is more opposed to the idea that mysteries do exist or the idea that he will, as per usual, eventually and unfailingly prove his own struggles to be "elusive understandings" whose conclusions are just as inevitable as any other. It's a choice between a stagnant mix of fear and frustration or a turbulent and reluctant acceptance of an impending fate. It's a choice between what is known and what is not, and he finds himself for once balancing precariously on the border of the unfamiliar side.

He has never not wanted to know something before.

And yet. And yet.

He remembers looking at Moriarty and seeing himself. He remembers a backward reflection, an explicit reversal. What could have been. What if.

And every so often, although he tries not to admit it even to himself, he catches himself looking at John.

It's an extension. An addition. An improvement, which is something he'd never thought he'd think of himself. It makes his throat dry.

What could be, still.

What if.

Sherlock is hopeful and Sherlock is afraid and John quells it for now but it is quickly becoming not enough. He knows the resolution is either coming or it's not and he's helpless to provoke or avoid it. It's the final chapter of the paperback novel, the final turn in Cluedo, and for once Sherlock hasn't already figured out the ending.

Mysteries or not - any alternative explanation is just as unsatisfying, and Sherlock gives up giving a piss about how to define it.

He can't even figure out what to call them, and it's a slap in the face that he bears unflinchingly because there is nothing else to do.

\---

He supposes fate - the most accurate description of the trap he's fallen into - is unavoidable, even if the reasons for it continue to escape him. When he tries to think like that, tries to accept that as his conclusion, his whole body seems to reject it out of pure habit and he's manic again.

He doesn't understand it.

But then John is there.

And Sherlock is utterly calm.


End file.
